Saturday, May 2, 2009

marvel's money machine keeps on printing notes

I liked this movie somewhat and I am incredibly ashamed of myself

Wolverine is a comic book character that is "nasty, brutish and short" (and hairy and I can't get enough of that quote). He is also Canadian. Hugh Jackman is none of these things: cheesy Oscar hosting all-around-nice-guy, tall, Australian, OK he's hairyish I'll give him that, but he's not Wolverine hairy. So, when you're thinking about casting marvel's most iconic mutant character who better to portray the self proclaimed best he is at what he does...and what he does is snkkkt (cheers, Awesomed by Comics) than our good mate Hugh. Yep, that's why they pay Fox executives the big bucks.

I'm being unfair to Hugh, but it was really hard to take this film (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) seriously, all that earnest grunting and howling while looking skyward with claws unretracted. This is no Dark Knight. In spite of it's lumbering attempts at gravitas, it still managed to pose deeply ponderous dramatic questions. Like: Why is Deadpool's mouth sewn shut? Why are there 10 million mutant cameos in this thing? Why is Patrick Stewart's face CGIed onto some random body (Has it gotten this bad these days that CGI is even used for the non-action scenes? Seriously?); did Jean LucPickard die without me hearing about it or something? Oh, that's right, X-Men 3. Why do those stupid werewolf rip-off adamantium bullets mind wipe Wolvie? Why didn't Striker think of using them before the closing scene? They actually paid someone to write this dreck, are you kidding me? Why should I care about any of this?

They say the secret to never being disappointed is having low expectations. And no one could have had lower expectations for this movie than I did. I just saw Dragonball the Movie last week. That's the level of putridness I was expecting. Instead I got a moderately entertaining movie. I really didn't want to like it, there was so much wrong with it and yet I still enjoyed the damn thing. Hugh Jackman: one. Me: zero. Comparison is how I make sense of the world, so here's a list of some of the comic movies this was better than: Watchmen (yep, I said it), X-Men (yep I said it), Ghost Rider, Superman Returns, Elektra, Daredevil, Catwoman, those horrible Fantastic Four movies, etc, etc. If you feel like some mindless entertainment give it a watch.